Tag: PERFORMANCE

Wladimir Palant, developer of the most popular add-on in the world, Adblock Plus, is also an active contributor to the Planet Mozilla blog community. Over the last few days, in response to Mozilla's new name and shame list of slow add-ons, Palant has been investigating whether Mozilla's testing methods are actually accurate. Rather surprisingly, it turns out that Mozilla's numbers could be ...

Mozilla, continuing its year-long crusade to speed up Firefox startup and shutdown times, has published a name and shame list of the Firefox's slowest add-ons. The list is just one part of Mozilla's new efforts to highlight slow add-ons, and to help developers make their add-ons more efficient. Over the next two weeks, 'slow performance warnings' will be introduced in the add-on gallery so ...

Yesterday's rather shocking finding that the Nexus S loads Web pages 52% faster than the iPhone 4 has turned out to be a sham. Apple has lashed out at Blaze Software, the company behind the test, saying: "Their testing is flawed. They didn't actually test the Safari browser on the iPhone. Instead they only tested their own proprietary app, which uses an embedded Web viewer that doesn't ...

If your Android phone shipped with the Amazon MP3 app pre-installed, you may have found yourself frustrated by a couple things. First, it's not so easy to remove. Second, the app had a nasty habit of starting up automatically when you power on or reboot your phone whether you wanted it to or not -- making the fact that you can't remove it even more vexing. Fortunately, Amazon has finally ...

Stop! Stop your Friday afternoon it's-only-two-hours-until-weekend procrastination! Focus on this tab for just a moment because I have a lot to tell you. We've covered so much Firefox news this week that you can't possibly have read it all. You need this round-up like you need a Friday beer. Enough waffling... let's rock. Firefox 4 Beta 7 has been released for Windows, Mac and Linux Almost ...

If you're old enough, you probably remember what a RAM disk is. Back in the olden days, to squeeze every last bit of juice out of your computer (usually for the purpose of playing Doom), you could load a program into a RAM disk -- a virtual drive made out of spare RAM. As I'm sure you know, RAM is a lot faster than your hard drive Fast forward to today, and most computers have a lot of spare ...

You may not be checking in on AreWeFastYet.com all that often. You may even have not known it existed until just now. Whatever the case may be, there's a very good reason to pay attention to Mozilla's Firefox 4 performance gauge. In tonight's test run, Firefox's SpiderMonkey and the JIT tandem of JägerMonkey and TraceMonkey finally beat Google Chrome's V8 engine in a SunSpider benchmark ...

Happy Firefox Friday, friends! In the lead up to an exciting winter, things have been heating up at Mozilla. There's strong competition from all sides. The IE9 beta launches next week and we'll soon see whether Microsoft can transform its excellent developer previews into something which can make the end-user salivate. Chrome's hardware acceleration currently leads the pack, and will presumably ...

Curious about how your current Internet provider compares to other local options? Take a look at Ookla's Net Index, which has compiled user test results from around the world into easy-to-understand rankings. Data is gathered from both speedtest.net and pingtest.net, and covers the entire globe. In total, Net Index has sifted through more than 1.5 billion tests, and there have probably ...

Before you ask: no, the third developer preview of Internet Explorer 9 doesn't have any window chrome yet. It's still the same skeleton you've seen in the two previous releases. That said, it's clear that Microsoft is serious about delivering a competitive browser. IE9 preview 3 has turned in better SunSpider and Acid3 results, and its hardware acceleration features really shine. The new ...

It's about time! In the next few weeks and months NVIDIA will unify its driver releases. No longer will you have to seek out graphics drivers from your laptop's manufacturer: you'll be able to simply grab the drivers from the NVIDIA website. Dubbed 'Verde', these drivers will presumably tie in with new hardware slowly emerging from the NVIDIA factories. These laptop drivers won't be part of ...

I happened to use Brown Paper Tickets a couple of months ago to buy tickets for a local comedy show. It was just as simple and easy as any other ticketing system I've used, certainly simpler (and faster) than Ticketmaster. But the real magic happens if you are putting a show together. Brown Paper Tickets has the lowest transaction fees and doesn't collect a dime if you don't sell any tickets. ...

Yesterday you read about Mozilla's effort to boost Firefox's Javascript processing speed with the new JägerMonkey engine. Now Asa Dotzler has blogged about another feature -- freshly landed in the Firefox nightly builds -- which should speed up the 'fox even more. The gfx.font value above is a new about:config value which toggles GPU accelerated rendering via DirectX 11's DirectWrite and ...

Ever since Google dropped Chrome and the V8 Javascript engine on the performance-hungry masses, developers of other browsers have been working hard at leveling the playing field. Opera 10.50's Carakan engine is blazingly fast and many users report it outperforming V8 on benchmarks. Firefox users who recently upgraded to 3.6 have seen a nice jump in performance as well, though TraceMonkey still ...

Google's Public DNS has been up and running for a few days now, and the reviews and benchmarks are slowly starting to trickle in. Initial results seem to suggest that it works well, but may not be a blanket solution for all, or even many, Internet users. It seems to depend wildly from ISP to ISP. If you're fortunate enough to have an Internet provider like Verizon's FiOS that runs a ...